Teaching EFL to Very Young Learners, Part 1

I started teaching my child English when she was 3y8m old. The software that we used was very positively accepted, and the child was required to provide her responses using the computer mouse and clicking. The CD-ROM Cookie & Friends by Vanessa Reilly, OUP, was amongst the very first.

Product Description
Provides a colouring activity for each of 12 different topics (relating to the Cookie and friends classbook units). This CD-ROM includes a game for each of the 12 topics. It is simple to use and doesn’t require typing skills. It covers animated traditional nursery rhymes for the children to enjoy.

My child progressed in the following way as far as this software is concerned. It took her a few minutes to learn to operate the mouse.  She initially liked the coloring activities the best, then she learned to manage the games.  In between she tried the digital story lots of times, and I couldn’t help feeling surprised at her not giving up, because it must have been the umpteenth time when she managed to do the whole sequence on her own. The nursery rhymes were initially disliked, but later she grew to like them very much and learned them by heart. Now that she is 6y4m old, she still hums those tunes once in a while, and asks me to put the CD-ROM on for her to practise.

TBC

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